Recent efforts to synthesize research and theory on perceived control suggest that accurate control judgments require at least three ingredients: (1) A contingency judgment the individual must correctly gauge the degree to which the target outcome can be influenced by people's behavior; (2) A competence judgment--the individual must correctly assess the ability of the actor to produce the behavior on which the outcome is contingent; and (3) Integration of contingency and competence information--the individual must combine contingency and competence information in a logical manner. To understand the development of perceived control requires an understanding to the development of all three processes. There is already a rich and growing fund of evidence on the development of the first two processes, but there is virtually no evidence on development of the third. The proposed research is designed to help fill this gap. Study 1 will use a controlled vignette procedure. Male and female subjects from grades 3, 6, 9 and college, will read vignettes in which protagonists who are either high or low in competence are placed in situations of either high or low contingency. With each vignette, subjects will rate the amount of control the protagonist has over a target outcome (e.g., a grade given for a written report). Analyses will focus on the ways subjects at various age levels combine contingency and competence information to arrive at judgments about control. The second study will probe similar issues, but in a more naturalistic setting: the North Carolina State Fair. Children, adolescents, and adults, visiting the fair will make judgments about the contingency of selected midway games, the competence of a player (either self or an observed companion), and the degree to which the player will have control over the game outcome. Study 3 will test a specific hypothesis as to why children have special difficulty reasoning about contingency, competence, and control in the domain of chance events. The hypothesis is that, contrary to a traditional attribution theory perspective, children construe "luck" as an internal, controllable cause to which the rules of contingency apply, and at which one may become competent--as in the case of a "lucky person." Overall, the proposed research is intended to enrich our understanding of the ways people at various ages work from component information to arrive at judgments about control.